Los Santos, chronicle of a city

The city of the docks

Before Vinewood, before the towers of Pillbox Hill, Los Santos was a port with a city attached. Everything that came into Southern California went through its docks, and whoever controlled the unloading controlled the price of everything else.

In 1958 three families founded the Los Santos Port Consortium (Consorcio Portuario de Los Santos): the Vance family (the shipping line, the ships), the Galloways (cranes, stevedoring and, later, the construction company) and the Duartes (customs and customs brokers: the paperwork). A fourth partner, the Kessler Trust bank, put up the money and kept the books. For twenty years they shared the port without fighting, because there was more than enough for all four.

On the other side of the dock stood the Longshoremen's Union, Local 14. Without its men not a single container came off a ship, and its historic boss, Walter "Big Walt" Riordan, knew it: he charged a toll on every ship, in cash and with no receipt. The Riordans never owned anything, but everything passed through their hands.

In 1974 the North Terminal (Terminal Norte) opened on Elysian Island. The money that came in that decade built downtown, paid for the Vinewood studios and left the families' names carved on the façades. It is the time the old-timers still call the dock years.

Concrete and silence

In 1983 an earthquake split the south of the city. A huge rebuilding fund arrived, the Rebuild Plan (Plan Reconstruir), and Governor Harlan Pierce ran it. For six years they opened bridges that already existed and hospitals that were never finished. The contracts almost always went to Galloway Construcciones, the payments went through the Kessler Trust, and a share came back, clean, into the pockets of half the cabinet.

In 1989 a Kessler accountant, Ana Beltrán, brought the Blue Book (Libro Azul) to light: the Rebuild Plan's second set of books. It was the Pierce scandal. The governor resigned and half the cabinet fell with him; Pierce left the city on a yacht and never came back. Beltrán was found dead in 1990 in her apartment in Rockford Hills. The case is still open.

Out of those ruins came the legal order the city knows today:

• 1990The Clean-Up Act (Ley de Saneamiento) rebuilt the Gobernación: governor, cabinet, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) as its judicial branch, with prosecutors, judges, notaries and registries. The Los Santos Superior Court opened that year.
• 1991The old Metropolitan Police, which for decades had taken money from the port and the union, was disbanded after the night of Innocence Boulevard, when it opened fire on a march of striking longshoremen (seven dead).
• 1991The LSPD was born at the Mission Row station, with a new badge, new rules and a charter of principles that cadets still sign: the Mission Row Charter. Its first commissioner was Irene Walsh.

The city learned two things in those years: that port money doesn't launder itself, and that there is always someone willing to launder it.

The routes

While the city was cleaning up its face, out in the desert someone was opening roads.

Tomás Ferreira, "the Old Man" (el Viejo), started in the mid-nineties with small-time smuggling across the Alamo Sea. By 2000 he had dirt airstrips in Sandy Shores, in Grapeseed and at the old McKenzie airfield, unregistered light planes and a network of sheds across Blaine County. What landed in the desert came into the city by truck… and left through the port.

That is where the two worlds met. In 1998, at a table that never officially existed, the Alamo Agreement (Acuerdo del Álamo) was sealed: the Ferreiras brought it in, the Duarte brokers made sure the containers were never opened, and the port's construction companies turned dirty money into buildings. The Galloways never touched a gram, but they built half the city with money that wasn't theirs.

Between the Ferreiras and the street a new layer appeared: the Vespucci Table (la Mesa de Vespucci), four families who sat in the back room of a restaurant in Vespucci Canals to divide up the business. The Riordans (the union), the Sarnos (gambling and loans), the Castells (transport) and the Iturbes (the night: bars, clubs, security). They produced nothing: they laundered, lent, collected and guaranteed. They were the city's first modern mafia.

And down below, in Davis, Strawberry, Chamberlain and Rancho, the gangs grew: neighbourhood kids who sold on street corners what came down from the desert and killed each other over blocks that belonged to no one. Nobody remembers their names from back then: almost none of them made it to thirty.

The 2008 crash left half the port out of work. The gangs had never had so many willing hands.

The Night of the Pier

Old Man Ferreira died in 2016, of old age, which in his line of work is close to a miracle. He left the business split between his children: Inés Ferreira, who kept the desert routes, and Nicolás "Nico" Ferreira, who ran the way out through the port. They hated each other politely.

On 14 October 2019, a big Ferreira shipment was due to change hands on Del Perro Pier, at night, with the ferris wheel switched off. There were two buyers: the Vespucci Table and someone from outside whom nobody ever identified. And there was a traitor. Someone warned each buyer that the other was coming to rob them, and told the LSPD where everything would be.

It was the Night of the Pier (la Noche del Muelle). The shooting started on the pier and spread through Vespucci until dawn. The pier burned; the whole bay watched the ferris wheel go up in flames. Twenty-three dead, among them Inés Ferreira, Tony Sarno and four police officers. Nico Ferreira vanished that same night. The shipment was never found.

Nobody ever found out who the traitor was. Some say it was someone from the port, some say it was a cop, and some say they left the city that same week, like so many others who left without saying goodbye.

What came next was worse than the shootout:

• 2019The Ferreira cartel fell apart. The desert routes were left without an owner.
• 2019–20The Mission Row Purge. The investigation into the Night revealed that eleven officers were on the Ferreira payroll. The LSPD chief at the time, Dale Mercer, resigned; three officers went to prison and two were never seen again.
• 2019The Vespucci Table lost two seats. Tony Sarno died on the pier; the Castells sold everything and moved to another state.

The Ladder

After a year of small wars over the leftovers, those still standing sat down at the Casa de la Cima, the hilltop mansion next to the Vinewood sign, in February 2020. Nobody signed anything. What came out of that meeting is the Ladder (la Escalera), the pact everyone keeps and no one admits to:

And permission comes from the Gobernación. At the Casa de la Cima there was a cabinet man sitting in a corner, and ever since, the Gobernación has acted as referee: it approves who climbs, when and at whose expense. Officially, so the Night of the Pier never happens again. In the corridors they say every promotion has a price and that the Gobernación charges for its own rung too.

The years that followed were an armed peace. The LSPD rebuilt itself with new people and a budget that is never enough. The port went back to work. And the Gobernación, the same one that had sworn to clean up the port in 1990, filled up with port names all over again.

• 2024The city's only serious newspaper, El Diario del Pacífico, published the North Terminal case: the terminal's concession had been renewed for thirty years to a company behind which stood, once again, the Galloways, the Kessler Trust and a firm linked to Governor Richard Aldana. The Diario closed three months later "for financial reasons". Its editor, Clara Montiel, lives abroad.
• 2025Frank Riordan, Big Walt's grandson and boss of Local 14, went to prison for extortion, and from his cell he can't put anyone in charge. Judge Margaret Hale, who was handling the North Terminal case, died in a traffic accident on the Great Ocean Highway that nobody quite believed. Her seat on the Superior Court is still empty.
• March 2026With the North Terminal case reopened, Governor Aldana left the city "on official business" and never came back. The Gobernación runs on an interim cabinet, and the LSPD, whose chief the Gobernación appoints, on a provisional command nobody knows how long will last.

This is the city you arrive in today.